Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Web 2.0 resources, search engines and their development. These are my personal views and not those of CILIP or any other organisation I may be associated with.

October 06, 2008

UK access to Ask.com blocked?

Here's an interesting thing - when I try and go to www.ask.com I always get re-routed to UK Ask at http://uk.ask.com/ and that's not a problem, because I can click on the link that lets me choose another version. Or at least, there was such a link - this is from UK Ask a few months ago:

See that little 'Ask.com Worldwide' link? I could click on that and go to the version that I wanted to. However, the current page looks like this:
Gone! So I've spent the last 20 minutes kicking around the site trying to find out how to get the US version, where all the interesting things are happening. Maybe it's there somewhere, maybe it isn't (My guess is the latter), but the point is that if I can't find it instantly then it may as well not be there.

I can understand that Ask want to treat their UK users as second class citizens - nothing new there, and functionality they've rolled out either gets to us late or not at all, but which halfwit was it who decided that we simply were going to be blocked from the US version with the new features? Since when has providing *less* functionality and content been regarded as helpful?

I really do rather hope that someone can put me right and that I've just got it wrong, but to be honest I have my doubts.

Similar to how Google.com gives me geotargeted Canadian results, even when I'm google.com and not google.ca. I'm getting sick of geotargeting personally. The web is international and search engines shouldn't be imposing unrequested borders. Filtering options are great, but taking away user options isn't.